"Switching off your phone and throwing it in the river is not a solution"

an interview w/ leftist technologist Lou Millar-McHugh

If you didn’t follow me here from Instagram three years ago, you may not know that I started Sluggish as an alternative to what I felt had become a problem — my social media use.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was part of a larger trend in 2022 that has only picked up steam since — so many content creators have shifted away from social media feeds that “why I quit influencing” is now it’s own genre of confessional.

I wasn’t really an influencer; I’d tried doing a couple dildo ads, and immediately hated it. I was just making memes, oversharing about my mental illness, and infodumping what I’d been reading about, and people were interested.

To be honest, I owe a lot to social media — it’s how I explored my queerness when I was living in a red state, where I first learned about the neurodiversity movement, and what eventually led me to realize that I wanted to focus on writing. But it also poked at some very particular wounds, and stoked my anxiety into paranoia.

I drifted away from my accounts, but I never joined the digital detox camp, because it just didn’t make sense to me. Social media is here, it’s part of our social fabric, it has real effects on the world, and very few of us can afford to ignore it entirely. So how do we use it without letting it use us?

During a scroll recently, I discovered a project called Irrational Technology, by UX designer and leftist technologist Lou Millar-McHugh. While studying UX design, Lou’s research focused on social media literacy as an alternative to restriction, and Irrational Technology continues that project through a socialist lens.

Their work speaks to a lot of questions I’ve been grappling with since starting this newsletter, so I was very excited to pick their brain about it!

Listen on Substack, Spotify, or Apple, or check out a snippet of our conversation below, lightly edited for length/clarity/your reading pleasure.

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Jesse: Why ‘Irrational’ Technology?

Lou: As a designer, the first thing I often noticed is that computers are overly rational and humans aren't entirely rational, and this causes a lot of frustration, because you feel like they're not doing what you need them to do, just on a design basis.

But then, when I was doing my honours project and I was exploring persuasive design, I realized that this is often used as a justification for persuasive design.

So, the idea that humans are entirely rational is used as a way to say, well, it's fine that we do these manipulative tactics, because people have willpower, and that means that they're going to be able to just switch off when they want to. But when you take a different view of humanity, you realize we can't just use willpower to turn off from stuff like this, it's more complex than that.

I, then, being a leftist, obviously started to connect this reverence of rationality and willpower to neoliberalism. The parallels are quite obvious, once you start looking into it a bit more. So, my idea is that technology should be irrational…it's that technology is too rational, and it should be less rational so that it mimics humans more, so that it operates in ways that humans actually operate.

Jesse: I liked it instantly because a lot of my work is also around irrationality and like, madness and emotion and feeling, coming from a disability perspective. But you mentioned persuasive design. Could you explain what that is?

Lou: So, persuasive design basically encompasses a huge range of design tactics, all of which are used to just keep you scrolling, keep you engaged longer. Usually that takes the form of the hook cycle.

It first became popular by a guy who wrote a book called Hooked.¹ The guy who invented this was basing it off of research that came out of some prestigious university [that] had a behavioural design lab that has since been shut down because they were like, this is unethical.

But companies like TikTok and Meta keep using it anyway, even though the people who invented it — both the people who came up with it in an academic setting and the guy who popularized it — have both since been like no, this was bad. We shouldn't have done this.

Jesse: Usually people talk about that idea of the feed hooking you in a very like, chemical sense, but it sounds like persuasive design is more than dopamine or the chemicals happening in your brain?

Lou: Definitely. Obviously, the main the main way we see it is social media. The thing about the hook cycle is that it does explain the behavioral cycle once it's started, but it doesn't necessarily explain why it started in the first place.

Hooks are always going to be different things, and the way we see them the most and the way I talk about them the most is on social media. So, often that's social validation, or seeking some kind of recognition or fame by posting a TikTok of your outfit. The hooks that start there are rooted often in social desires and the way we interact with one another, and can be rooted in all sorts of things.

Jesse: I feel like there's a lot of conspiratorial discourse and critique going around about how screens are like drugs and phones are destroying society, and it doesn't really touch on emotion and what you're saying, social desires, like what people want and how they want to interact with each other. I've been very critical of these very drug-based metaphors.

Lou: I just think that if you're — and I mean, I'm an extremely privileged person and I'm always talking about how important it is to acknowledge your privilege — but I'm from Glasgow, I know what addiction looks like.² And if you look at the way that people interact with their devices and you think that that's addiction, you're very sheltered and you should go outside and meet some people who are actually addicted to drugs, because this isn't addiction,³ and comparing it to addiction is ignorant, and people do it for clickbait.

Either they know that that's not what addiction looks like, or they're just ignorant, and they often do it to feed into the exact same systems that they're claiming to be critiquing, because that's more scandalous than saying, social media is bad sometimes and good sometimes, and maybe we should think about our economic policy and redistributing wealth.

That doesn't get as many clicks as, social media is like heroin!

They're benefiting from the same systems that they're critiquing, which is also a big problem with that kind of content. And also the fact that it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny academically, when you look at the evidence, it's just simply not true. So that doesn't help either.

Jesse: Yeah, it leads to very prohibitive solutions…like Jonathan Haidt and The Anxious Generation, his recommendations are like, no phones before a certain age. And it's just another kind of prohibition, I think — if we're going to continue the drug metaphor — which doesn't work for drugs, and also I don't think it's going to work for screens.

Lou: Yeah. He really gets on my nerves.

Jesse: Yeah, me too!

Lou: There's quite a lot of problems with his work, like honestly, if I'd handed that in for my undergrad dissertation, I probably wouldn't have passed. Despite the fact that I don't agree with his politics, it's shoddy work.

He claims correlation and causation without exploring any alternative factors. The data he uses is entirely based in the US, and the data that he uses, the increase in mental health issues, it also is the same time that Obamacare was introduced. So, maybe more people accessing mental health care might have had something to do with the rise in diagnosis of mental health conditions..

Jesse: Yeah.

Lou: And it just doesn't work! I didn't have a phone till I was 12, I wasn't on social media till I was 16, because it wasn't around, it wasn't popular in the same way… and I've still had to reflect on my experiences with social media, I've still had times where, because of things that are going on in my life, I use it far too much.

So if that worked, you wouldn't have generations of older people who, you know, still have a problematic relationship with their devices, so it doesn't make any sense…

Jesse: Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about these centrist critiques, and I made a YouTube essay about this horrible book called Digital Madness, which is kind of a very similar argument to The Anxious Generation, but it came out a couple years earlier and it's like, much more fringe…he goes on these long rants about the singularity and the tech overlords, and like, being in the Matrix and stuff.

But I got a comment on that video that I've been thinking about because someone was like, yes and, you know, leftists can't afford to ignore criticisms of tech at the same time. Like, there are real problems happening. So I'm wondering what you think a left critique should focus on and how we can differentiate it?

Lou: There needs to be a critique of technology, but centrist and right wing critiques of technology are entirely useless, because they're not diagnosing the problem, because it was capitalism that created this technology in the first place.

The internet is pretty much the only industry at its scale that started after deregulation. That's why it's like this, there was no regulation from the start. I mean, at least in the UK, all the other major industries, like BT, the telephones, they were all super regulated, especially more so in Scotland. So, that's part of the reason why it's so different to other technologies.

And really, the critique has to lie in an understanding of where this root problem is, and the root problem is obviously always going to be capitalism. So, I think understanding is power. Simply just switching off your phone and throwing it in the river is not a solution.

It's not going to help, especially from a leftist perspective, then you're just shutting everything out. Because you have things like the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and we've never seen this kind of coverage of an ongoing genocide.

That could be transformative to the way leftists do politics if we use it properly, and that has to come from an understanding, and obviously that understanding has to be rooted in a leftist critique of technology, which has to be rooted in the ways that it benefits capitalism and the ways that that's present in the structure of the system itself, because with understanding we can also explore what technology for the collective might look like.

Jesse: You talk a lot about user autonomy as really central to the problems with tech. Can you explain a little bit more about that?

Lou: I have a brother who's like, six years younger than me, and so when I was first learning about that, he was starting to use social media for the first time, and I'm noticing him having reactions to the different ways he was interacting with social media that I could explain, [but] he couldn't explain, and my parents couldn't explain. And for me, that's an autonomy issue.

That's an issue of, you don't understand how these platforms are impacting you, therefore you cannot have full control over your devices, control [over] your digital experiences, because you don't understand what's happening, which means you can't really make an informed choice.

So, say, like, if you're caught in a doom scroll, right, you've already learned about how on TikTok the videos take up the whole screen — that wasn't the case for most of social media, it's a fairly new thing in short form video — that makes you want to keep scrolling more, because your brain doesn't know what's coming next.

And the same with a lot of things, like the way that it's really hard to find something you've just seen on social media. If you see something on TikTok, it’s really hard to then go and find it again unless you save it. That also has the same effect.

Jesse: Oh, that's on purpose? Because I'm constantly doing that, like, why can't I find this video??

Lou: Because if you saved it, if you were able to easily find it, and then find the information you wanted, you'd then go and do something about the information you've just learned, and you wouldn't stay on the platform.

It wants to feed you little emotional nuggets. That's the hook cycle. It wants to feed you little emotional nuggets so that you keep looking for those emotional nuggets subconsciously, and if you're able to, when you're caught in that cycle, recognize that it's happening, it loses its power over you.

Jesse: You also made a Leftist’s Guide to Staying Off Your Phone?

Lou: That started as a TikTok series. I think it just kind of succinctly explained what I was trying to do. Staying off your phone is obviously, that's an oversimplification, but it's just to get the message across.

I think the goal with the Leftist’s Guide to Staying Off Your Phone is, as much as I'm all about focusing on the collective, something like this should start with your individual relationship with it and then extend into other things.

[link]

I always like to start with like, let's talk about our assumptions. Let's talk about what we think about this topic before we start learning about it, because that's something I always do in any design process. There's a part at the start where I encourage people to just kind of think about how they think about their relationship with their devices and reflect on that before going into the educational bit of it.

And then I cover the basics, I cover some of the persuasive design tactics and then later on, I cover a section on how, often our impulse to go to social media can be because we're looking for a break, we're looking for a rest.

Sometimes that makes us feel good afterwards, sometimes it doesn't make us feel good afterwards. But what's happening there is that you're using social media to fulfill some unmet need that you have — whether that's working or not is a separate question.

So, the reflective questions in that section are: when I'm using social media to fill an unmet need, and it doesn't make me feel good afterwards, what unmet needs are coming up consistently?

Jesse: I thought about that a lot when I was using Instagram too much, I was like, why am I doing this?

And yeah, I think for me, I am very curious about other people and what they're saying and what they're thinking and how they're relating to each other, and I like to observe that. And sometimes I get sucked into that too much, that sort of like, I don't know, anthropological lurking, and then I just take it way too far and I can't stop.

And then I have all the thoughts of humanity in my head and like, it's overwhelming. I don't know if I've fully been able to find a solution for that, cause I kind of just transferred from Instagram to TikTok.

Lou: Yeah, the second question after that was, what can I add to my life that meets this unmet need?

So my advice would be, if you're thinking that social media is maybe not the best way of exploring that, what are other ways you can explore that desire you have in a way that feels more fulfilling?

It's about coming from a place of non-judgement. Maybe social media is fulfilling that unmet need and it's helping you. Both my brother and I sometimes will scroll if we're socially overwhelmed, and my mom always has a go at my brother for this, and I just think that what looks polite and what looks like you have a good relationship with social media on the surface to other people doesn't necessarily correlate with what's good for your well-being.

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We go on to discuss our favorite ADHD technology, what’s wrong with screen time apps and gamification, what platforms we’re going to be using in 2025, and our (chaotic) content creation processes.

Listen to the rest of the interview, and check out Lou’s reading list!!!

1. Nir Eyal, who, ironically, six years after Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products, wrote a book called Indistractible: How To Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Neoliberalism is when you write the book on how companies can manipulate people for profit and then you write another book on how it’s not the companies’ fault, you just need to manage your attention better!!!!!!

2. For my fellow Americans who may not know (I didnt!), Scotland has the highest rate of drug overdoses in Europe.

3. Worth noting here that defining addiction is complicated and there’s a lot of disagreement about it! Generally, the issue is that saying things like ‘screen addiction’ and ‘phone addiction’ is too non-specific and doesn’t actually describe what is happening. The phone is a medium through which we engage in various behaviors. What are you doing on your phone? Shopping? Gambling? Playing video games with your friends? For more on conceptualizing addiction, I like this book of critical essays and Carl Erik Fisher’s newsletter Rat Park (he makes a similar point to Lou about understanding design tactics in this post, actually).